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If you live in America, you might be accustomed to the typical American notion of working hard all day everyday. No Days Off. Go Big or Go Home. No Sleep, Just Hard Work.
People idolize the idea of pushing your body and your mind to the brink of exhaustion, and to push past even when you physically and mentally cannot give any more.
And although there is some truth behind these notions, there is also a huge misconception that is created that plagues the minds of many athletes and fitness goers which leads them down the path to a little something called over-training.
What is over-training? The term over-training, can be defined as pushing your body past its limit and to the point where it cannot recover from the damage it's put through when performing strenuous exercise. This can lead to a decrease in your performance in your training sessions and games, and lead to injury.
Many players have gone through a spell of over-training, and let me tell you from personal experience, it is one of the most frustrating things in the world.
All you want to do is work hard all day everyday, push past your limit to chase development and get ahead of your opponents.
However, your own body is holding you back, and when you consistently mess up in your training, and you consistently fail to progress in the gym, you feel even more overwhelmed and stressed.
Over-training has been a huge issue in my journey as a soccer player. However, once I learned about the importance of rest and recovery days, and giving my body the extra love it needed, the more progress I saw, even if I was training less than what I was previously when I hit my plateau.
In this blog post, you will read about my personal experience with over-training, and the reasons why recovery days are important to include in your training routine.
My Experience With Over-Training
Over-training has been a chronic issue that I've had to deal with many many times.
I'd hit a plateau in my training, and I would feel demotivated, tired, and I would always get small pains in different areas of my body that stressed me out even more.
But because I was persistent, and didn't want to stop training, despite the signs my body was trying to give me, I pushed past the physical and mental fatigue.
Next thing you know, I'm sitting out for a month because that small tweak I had in my knee now has become a painful injury, and I'm not able to train the way I'd like.
This was actually something that happened not to long ago. I'd like to say it happened around July or August of 2020, so not to long ago.
While I was sitting out, I would feel such a strong urge to go and train. Every day as I sat out, I missed being able to go out to the field and be able to work hard and push myself to develop.
Once I was fully recovered from my knee injury, I tried to fix up my previous training plan in a way where I was able to put in more work, but still give my body the rest and time it needed to fully recover from the intense sessions.
By incorporating the right recovery methods and giving my body the rest it needed, I was able to train with more volume, intensity, and focus, and I would progress much more than when I was training daily and not being able to focus on my training due to my fatigue.
Even to this day, I would still have some days where my body would tell me I'm working too much and I need to take a step back.
Now that I have experienced the outcome of pushing past the stage of over-training, I now am more aware of the signs my body gives, and I don't hesitate to take that extra day off if I need it.
The Importance of Recovery Days
In the fitness community, too many people have the misconception that in order grow your muscles, you need to work them out each and every single day. However, this is FAR from the truth.
When you train and workout, you're putting your muscles under stress and tension, which can lead to microscopic tears in the fibers that make up the muscle.
This is nothing to be afraid of, in fact, it's essential for muscle growth and strength gain. These microscopic tears are what cause muscle soreness and tenderness the day after a workout. However, because of this misconception that people have, people continue to put even more stress on these already torn muscle fibers, which leads to the muscles to over stretch and tear, which causes damage to the point of injury, reversing the result they were looking for.
Instead of growing their muscles, they're just causing more damage and making them weaker as a result.
Muscle growth is a result of resting these torn muscle fibers, and allowing your body to rebuild itself and create even stronger fibers.
That is why it is imperative that you give your body at least one day a week for it to rest the stressed muscle groups.
Outside the gym and fitness community, the same thing applies for soccer athletes who train too much.
Your development as a soccer player isn't based off of the quantity of your training, but rather the quality of your training, and performing consistent and focused reps with good technique.
There is no point to performing rep after rep of a drill and shooting for quantity if you aren't 100% focused on perfecting every rep because you're too fatigued.
In order to develop as a player you must go into each session focused and be able to give it your all.
By consistently showing up every single day without giving your body the proper rest it needs, you will not only experience some physical pain and fatigue, but you will also experience mental fatigue.
Mental fatigue can often be worse than physical pain.
Mental fatigue is stuff such as a loss in motivation to train and workout, anger and frustration whenever mistakes are made, overstressing over your training, and a loss of focus when training and working out, which means you're giving out / fatiguing out too quickly even though your body can handle more.
Mental fatigue is a killer for more people's programs and it's what leads to laziness in many people.
They try to push themselves too hard too soon and work hard and train all day every day without giving their mind and body a day to relax.
This fatigues them out quickly and makes them dread having to go and train/workout the next day.
Soon they get so demotivated, they skip a day or two from their program, and then completely mess up their routine and progress.
Giving your mind a day to rest and relax will help keep your motivated and focused on each and every training session, so take a day or two off when you need it, and let your mind and body heal so that you aren't causing any strain on yourself and you can continue to push for development!
How to Properly Recover
During your rest days, your body naturally recovers using the many different systems and bodily functions it performs on a daily basis.
However, there are a few things you can do to aid the recovery process to speed up the healing and make sure you feel as fresh as possible before your next session. This study highlights some of the main things that most professional athletes use to recover post-match.
These things are:
Get 8-9 Hours of Quality Sleep: Sleep is your body's main tool for recovery, since during the time you are sleeping, your body releases special hormones that relaxes the heartbeat and the muscles, allowing for easier blow flow and for energy to be replenished into the exhausted muscles. If you only get 6 hours of sleep a night or less, you aren't properly allowing your body to recovery and rebuild those torn muscle tissues that need repair.
2. Feed Your Body Quality Foods: Your nutrition is also an important factor of your body's ability to recover properly. Your goal when recovering should be to consume quality complex carbohydrates in order to replenish your body's glycogen stores and to give your muscles the energy they need to repair themselves. You should also focus on consuming quality proteins in order to aid your body's natural process of protein synthesis, which is what allows for the creation of new proteins and cells to repair those torn muscle tissues.
3. Cold Water Immersion: This was one of the things under review in the study linked above. Cold baths can prove to be useful when trying to aid in the recovery process since the cold temperature constricts the blood flow in your muscles, which could lead to a decrease in inflammation and reduce the pain from delayed onset muscle soreness. However, Ice baths should be performed after your training session as soon as possible. It wouldn't be ideal to perform ice baths on the day of your recovery. On your recovery days, you'd rather promote blood flow instead of restrict it. However, if you're looking to speed up the recovery process, then taking a 15 to 20 minute ice bath after your intense session could prove useful.
4. Foam Rolling and Stretching
Unfortunately, not much research has been made to back up the effectiveness of foam rolling and stretching on recovery, however, this doesn't mean there is no correlation between active recovery such as these two methods on speeding up the recovery process.
Foam rolling is a form of myofascial release, which can help in reducing the tension in tight muscles and allow blood to flow easier to the areas of pain.
Combined with stretching and mobility work, and you can alleviate any pain or tenderness in certain muscle groups by promoting blood flow and increasing the range of motion of those muscles, which can help in preventing injuries when combined with an effective strengthening program.
How Many Days Should I Rest a Week?
The amount of rest you should take is 100% dependent on your body and how you feel mentally and physically. If you feel as if your body is being pushed too much and you're on the course for injury, then don't hesitate to take a few days off and let your body fully recover.
Personally, I found out that having 1-2 rest days a week works best for my body, and it's what allows me to continue to work hard for a long period of time, without feeling the effects of overtraining.
You might need just 1 rest day, or you might need more than 1, but don't feel bad if your body needs more rest than others. You need to find what works best for you and what will allow you to improve the most in the long run.
If you push your body too much to the point where you're getting injured, all of that extra work is going to just cause you to lose more time to train since you'll be sitting out because of an injury that could've been avoided by giving your body the rest it needs.
Listen to your body, and you'll be able to work longer, harder, and with more focus and be able to see more growth and development as an athlete and a soccer player.
Thanks for Reading. Get Up. Go GRIND.
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